Discussion about hosting.

The reason the time is so long is that lots of the drives on our network are spare drives or leftover drives that people are contributing to the network. These drives are essentially free, because they are just lying around doing nothing.

As the network grows, it will eventually outpace the amount of storage that can be provided by idle drives, and the price should go up to something more manageable. ROI of 18-30 months seems pretty reasonable to me.

$30/TB just covers the raw cost of the drive. Add the cost of land, electricity, server racks, etc, and the TCO of a drive rises to probably $60 for 3 years (which is about how long you would expect the drive to last before failing). So the high end of the price is likely to stay below $2 / TB for the lifetime of Sia.

Collateral is used to incentivize hosts to keep the files safe. If they lose a file, they will be penalized some part of the collateral. Right now the recommended number is 250 SC/TB/month. You also might want to check the http://sia.tech/faq

Sorry that we haven't been super responsive since the explorer went down. The release is tomorrow and understandably we've got our hands full with a bunch of last-minute bug reports and polishing details. The explorer breaking just a few days before the release was unfortunate, but at this point it's been beyond our resources to fix because we're already maxed out in our TODO list.

Most of the bugs and security issues being reported should be handled soon, we're all putting in extra hours to make sure the release goes smoothly.

In addition to reasons for running hosts for free (uncertainty about price, desire to receive the first contracts, not expecting significant profits anyway...) hosts also receive fees for network bandwidth, so some operators may have decided for this to be primary source of revenue.

I also made a darker version of the wallpaper with the full logo: https://pixeldra.in/u/I_-1t_. Now it blends in better with the rest of the dark background, and I also moved the layer below the grain effect, so it stands out a bit less.

Current version is 0.6.0 and can be considered stable. It does not have an UI, however, so you need to run Sia via the command line (which is quote easy). There has not been any wallet issues since 0.3.x. You can run the current version, transfer funds over and as long as you keep your wallet safe your funds will be there for the future too. Probably safer than keeping the funds on an exchange. That is, as safe as you make it.

Meh, to me, it just looks like Sia is growing, got a small pump early February and in March, went into a bear, and is now slowly rising up again. People, like me, were expecting Sia to keep growing but it went down a bit for the past month. I'm not entirely sure what it means overall other than the coin is waiting for an opportune time (i.e news of a new update) for it to be pumped again and go up in value. It should also be noted that due to the ever increasing amount of new coins being generated, it's expected for the coin to not be stable until real world storage application value can be established. The stability of the coin floor market was 16 sat and the news article predicts that it will rise up to 21 sat, meaning that the overall floor value of the floor (and value of sia) is expected to rise. Though it should also be noted that with this could simply be anticipating version 0.6 release of Sia and for the price to rise as a result.

So, yeah, I agree with the news report that says that there is possible a new floor for Sia and that the price is expected to rise very soon, which makes me hyped. Sia doesn't really appear a lot in the news (at least compared to stroj and MAIDSAFE) so it's nice to see that people are keeping an eye on Sia.

Sia prevents fake storage proofs because the peers can verify for themselves that the storage proof is not valid. If the storage proof is not valid, it will not be accepted into the transaction pool, it will not be accepted into a block, and it will not be broadcast to other peers.

They are quite lightweight to verify, a raspi would be able to verify them as quickly as it could download them.

I'm guessing the same rigs for litecoin can be used similarly to mine for sia coin.

Correct. Best way to mine Siacoin currently is with GPUs.

I'm not entirely sure how to understand the emission/inflation curve chart.

The inflation curve I linked you to shows the instantaneous annual inflation rate (i.e. it has been normalized for 12 months). It reports a percentage. For a given moment in time, the curve tells you how many more coins are being produced, relative to the current amount of coins in existence.

I'm guessing that it's because we switched the storage proof period from 6 weeks to 12 weeks. We're in the period where all of the 6 week storage proofs have expired but none of the 12 week storage proofs have.